[Radar]

I prefer "we'll release it when we want, you dickheads"

[NightFright]

ROTT HD Test by 4Players.de (German)

I will just translate the test summary at the end:

"For a few minutes, I actually really had considerable fun with this remake! I ran through rectangular labyrinths and enjoyed switch puzzles, fast action and a dashing firing test of my prestidigitation. However, as much as I appreciate this frenetic old-school action - besides the shooting gallery, it has far too little to offer. The excessive violence effects are wearing off quickly, sinister suspense is never occurring, the game hardly offers any diversions and the unimaginative behavior of the enemies is a disaster. This way, the "old school" turned into a modern old building step by step.
I can overlook several issues in the new Rise of the Triad because it is both imitating and ironically commenting on some idiosyncrasies - that's where it scores. At the end of the day, this hommage with all its rough glitches - first to mention the often malfunctioning multiplayer part - is sobering."

PRO:
- Fast action, responsive/direct controls
- Many puzzles and secret passages
- Explosive weapons and funny extras/references
- Various graphics settings

CON:
- Checkpoints too far apart, no manual saving
- Absolutely idiotic enemy AI
- Characters stuck in ceilings/walls plus many additional glitches

SCORE:
54% ("Sufficient - 4Players is disillusioned")

[Ronin]

 fuegerstef, on 04 August 2013 - 11:26 PM, said:

Those new to the internet and gaming might have missed it, of course. But as mentioned before, "Soon" was the new "Two weeks" (UT) or When it's Done (DNF).

Have you played RoTT yet? It would be interesting to hear your honest take on the game seeing as you are/were close to Interceptor. You are usually quiet outspoken on these matters, or are you (like me) waiting for the game to be fixed before fully diving in?

[----]

 Ronan, on 05 August 2013 - 12:12 PM, said:

Have you played RoTT yet? It would be interesting to hear your honest take on the game seeing as you are/were close to Interceptor. You are usually quiet outspoken on these matters, or are you (like me) waiting for the game to be fixed before fully diving in?

I will play it when there is support for right shift and right CTRL. My opinion about that is that it should have been fixed before release as this is an obvious bug ... especially for a remake of an old school game from a time where arrow keys where the norm for FPS.

EDIT:
I haven't read about possible ini-editing so far as I had been on an Open Air Festival from Wednesday til the weekend.

[Kristian Joensen]

 Ms. Radar, on 05 August 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

I prefer "we'll release it when we want, you dickheads"

The best release date I ever heard was "never".

[Ronin]

 fuegerstef, on 05 August 2013 - 12:37 PM, said:

I will play it when there is support for right shift and right CTRL.

Yeah, right CTRL is my jump button, I had to change it to mouse wheel forward and mouse wheel backwards for crouch which worked surprisingly well, but at the cost of handy weapon switching.

[100199]

While the ol'ROTT was never a favorite mine like Duke, Doom or Quake, it was for me a pretty decent frentic fps with plenty of satisfying guns, shooting and interesting (altought 'exotic') map design.

But this one, is really rough imo. While the guns themselves are ok, the AI is abysmal making the overall gunplay terrible. Map design really goes downhill on the mid to later levels. It might have other reedming qualities, but if the core combat doesn't satisfy me I have hardly any reaosn to go on.

Hope they [interceptor] improve on future titles, and improve on the Q/A department. Its clear to me that this game had barely to none proper testing whatsoever.

A completely forgettable attempt.

[OpenMaw]

Psst... Notice how the Interceptor guys are all gone now?


They got our money. Heeheeheehee...

[ReaperMan]

Just like DNF.

[K1n9_Duk3]

 fuegerstef, on 05 August 2013 - 12:37 PM, said:

I haven't read about possible ini-editing so far as I had been on an Open Air Festival from Wednesday til the weekend.

Wacken?

 Commando Nukem, on 05 August 2013 - 03:20 PM, said:

Psst... Notice how the Interceptor guys are all gone now?


They got our money. Heeheeheehee...

It's now 1:30 AM here in Europe, so they're probably sound asleep on a huge pile of cash.

[Green]

Quote

A Message from Game Director, Frederik Schreiber

To Our Beloved Fans, Newcomers to the Rise of the Triad Universe, and of course, our Haters.

My Name is Frederik Schreiber, and Im the Game Director on Rise of the Triad, and the CEO of Interceptor Entertainment.
As many of you know, Interceptor was formed in my bedroom, a cold winter day, in later November 2010.
Back then, I collected my best Online Friends, and talented developers from all over the world, to work on a project called "Duke Nukem Reloaded".
Roughly a year later, we got our first deal as a development studio - Or "Development From our Bedrooms" studio, which is more accurate.

Rise of the Triad was made with basically no budget, with the mindset that we wanted to create our dream project, in a reasonable Timeframe
(Rise of the Triad had a 1.5 year development cycle). It's made with blood, sweat, tears and most importantly - Passion.

It's also a learning experience - Learning how to work together virtually, which is something no-one has tried yet, with a project of this scale.
It's a learning experience in how to design games, without physically working together.


In this post I would like to address my feelings over the past few days, and what we are going to be focusing on in the future.


___________________________________________________



Checkpoint System and Quicksaves
We are big fans of quick saves. Quick Saves and a Real Save system was one of our highest requests internally when we started development, and something I personally pushed hard for.

In early April 2012 we had our first "Crunch Meetup" where we were going through our vertical slice.
And one issue struck us - Savegames in modern games is a nightmare - Especially in a game like Rise of the Triad.

The short version:
Savegames, require the "State" of the game to be saved.
That means, Scripted events, physics, enemies killed, etc.
Back in the day, all of these elements were extremely simple (Doom, Quake, Halflife etc), and were relatively straight forward to save.
In modern and very heavy games, it's very hard to save the state of everything accurately, and then rebuilding it all, once you load a save state.

The Escapist Wrote a great article called "Why we have Checkpoints", which explains in detail why almost every modern game is using a checkpoint system
instead of a save system

http://www.escapistm...ine.com/article ... oint-Saves

When working on Rise of the Triad, we realized that a Save System was almost impossible to do.
We had long talks with our Engineers and our Publisher Apogee. We realized we had to come up with a solution.

Our solution would be a mix between Checkpoints, and doing an "Overworld". Basically a "Super Mario" like, overworld, where you can pick and choose your checkpoints at any time.

We know that this is by far a perfect solution - But with our budget, timeframe and manpower, it was the solution we had to go with.

What can we do about it?
Early next week, I have a meeting with my Coders about Savegames.
We are going to sit down, and get a conversation going with our Contacts at Epic, to find a solution to this.
Rise of the Triad is very unique, and it will require a lot of work.

We are fully committed to our game, and are going to put a lot of effort into R&D on Savegames, for possible future patches.



___________________________________________________


Performance Issues

We are fully aware of the performance issues you guys are having, and it's very unacceptable that you have to rely on INI tweaks
in order to get the game to run smoother. We have been looking through every single thread on both our own, and the Steam Forums,
in order to collect all the data from you guys, and work them into our upcoming patch.

I also want to explain how our game works compared to other comparable games.

Everything in our levels is modular. When planning how we wanted to approach static meshes and drawcalls (Basically every level is made out of a number of static meshes, such as walls, towers, crates etc), we decided to go in the opposite direction of other developers.

When placing meshes in a scene, you rely on Drawcalls. The more meshes, the more drawcalls.
In many modern games, the drawcalls are very limited.

A good example is a Tower.
Usually, an artist would create the tower as 1 mesh, with all the player paths accurately modeled inside the tower.
This would produce 1 drawcall for the tower.

In Rise of the Triad, we created a big set of "Lego Blocks" instead, allowing the Level Designers, to build many variations of this tower themselves -
or even use all the small parts of the tower, such as cables, bricks, and even power-sockets, in other parts of the game.

This produces a lot of drawcalls, which drains performance, compared to having 1 asset. But there is a big reason for this approach -

Modding

When designing Rise of the Triad, we wanted to design the game with modding in mind. By approaching the game with a modular mindset,
we designed everything as individual meshes. Blicks, Cables, Stone, Caveparts (Our Cave Design Set is more than 20 pieces in total), etc.

This allows our Fans in the future to create levels the way they want to, with a huge amout of assets to drag and drop into the levels.

We could have limited the drawcalls, by doing big set pieces, but we decided not to - Modding and Level Editing is in our blood, and it's
the reason we are working with what we love. We didn't want to remove that element from our game - We wanted to embrace it.

The cost of this, was an average lower FPS than what you would expect from similar UE3 FPS - But a completely modular asset system,
which gives our fans endless possibilities once we release our development kit.


What can we do about it?
We are currently working on implementing different INI tweaks overall, to give you guys a smoother experience, for the upcoming patch.
One solution to limit the draw calls, is to merge2 assets together and replace our modular counterparts, with single assets in our levels.
This would require our Artists to redo key areas in the game, as big singular meshes. It's a huge undertaking that would take a lot of time.
We are currently working on key areas in the game where we can improve on this.



___________________________________________________



Multiplayer Balancing
Multiplayer Balancing is something we care a lot about, and we already have a lot planned for the future patches.
First of all, we are going to Nerf the GodHand.
In the next update, the GodHand will only spawn once every 5 minutes, and only last for 10 seconds.
We are also thinking about having it spawn in 1 of 5 hidden areas, at a random spot, in every match, to avoid Godhand campers.

We have also gotten a ton of info from you guys, of what you would like to see changed/tweaked/fixed, which we are currently analyzing.



___________________________________________________



What's Next?
We are currently working on a range of things.

First of all, we are trying to get out "Hotfix" patches our as soon as possible.
These cover core gamebreaking issues, and will have the .0.X Version numbers.

We are also working on a range of bigger updates, such as our Development Kit, Setdressing/Level Design Issues, etc.
We are also aware that our Non-Steam Patch Server provider are having huge issues atm, which are making it impossible for GOG users to play on Steam Servers.
It's something we are working around the clock to fix, and we will keep you updated on the progress.

For the next HotFix patch, we have the following planned:


Hotfix Patch 1.0.2
............................
- Framerate Lock OFF Fix
- Mouse Smoothing ”OFF” by default, and option in Launcher to turn it On
- Memory Pool Fix, which increases performance
- Pistol/MP40 Stuck Animation in Multiplayer after reload Fix (Clients)
- Re-enabling "Stat FPS" console commands
- ”ARE YOU SURE?” When restarting checkpoint and level
- Texture Streaming Tweaks to improve performance
- Option to map ARROWKEYS/NUMBERKEYS in the Options Menu
- Dying in Singleplayer with Armor after a checkpoint, will not restart with working armor
- Nerfed Multiplayer God Hhand
- Fix for Blood/Scope on Clients getting stuck on screen when dying while its activated
- Dublicate IP Login Issue Fix

We expect this patch to be out within the next couple of days.

For 1.1 We have the following planned:


Patch 1.1
............................
- Development Kit to allow mods and user maps
- User map and Mod options for both Singleplayer/Multiplayer
- New FREE Multiplayer Map DLC
- Fixes for Setdressing and Level Design issues gathered from Fan Feedback on the Steam Forums
- Overall Level Performance Increases
- Checkpoint System Fixes

We will add more to these lists internally, as we gather and discover more bugs and reports from you guys.
We currently have every single post and thread covered from both forums, and everything listed.


Last but not least, I want to Thank all of you! We have been getting both Great, and Mixed Reviews, and we are taking every single
review into account.

Rise of the Triad is our baby - And with your help and feedback, you have helped tremendously with raising him!

http://www.intercept...hp?f=151&t=3134

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Welp...

[OpenMaw]

What exactly is so unique about Rise of the Triad that makes save games so hard? It uses fundamentally "simpler" gameplay in terms of scripting than any modern shooters. It has more in common with Doom in terms of AI. Is it really -that- hard to create a dump of the entire game in it's current state that can then be reloaded at a later date? Realyl? Yeah, the file size will be bigger, but come on. Woopdeeshit.


Basically, it sounds like ROTT was poorly designed on the basic level.

[ReaperMan]

I'm guessing all the gore flying around.

[100199]

Not hating here, but it is just me that thinks professional developers that use the word 'haters' look like complete imature idiots? Reminds of that WARZ producer.

[Striker]

 MusicallyInspired, on 04 August 2013 - 05:33 AM, said:

Doom95 is a port and not a new game. Besides, whatever Gabe did before Half-Life was not as Valve so it doesn't count. I'm sure anyone who's gotten into game design and eventually started their own company did something else before their first project. And Team Fortress Classic came after Half-Life. Valve's first project was still Half-Life. An entirely brand new IP.

Team Fortress Classic did come after Half-Life, but it was another one of their earliest games, and it was based entirely on the Quake Mod.

What I'm saying, if they hadn't done any of this, Half-Life would have pretty much been their only game. (And while Half-Life is a big title, it's only a small fraction of what makes up the entirety of Valve's repertoire.)

[OpenMaw]

Quality of quantity.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Ouch! http://www.ign.com/a...he-triad-review
"But if you never played 1994’s RotT, and are thus incapable of wistfully experiencing this slavishly authentic regurgitation through nostalgia-colored glasses, it will probably – and hopefully, for your sake – be one of the worst shooters you’ve ever played."

[Micky C]

 Mr. Tibbs, on 05 August 2013 - 06:35 PM, said:

Ouch! http://www.ign.com/a...he-triad-review
"But if you never played 1994’s RotT, and are thus incapable of wistfully experiencing this slavishly authentic regurgitation through nostalgia-colored glasses, it will probably – and hopefully, for your sake – be one of the worst shooters you’ve ever played."

Ouch indeed. Despite it's problems, I'm having way more fun with it than DNF, especially considering the price.
That review was overly critical of the graphics, and didn't take the price into account at all. It's like they were judging it by the standards of a full blown AAA Call of Duty game, which are about as different as you can get in every way.

Also, so Fresch is finally willing to put manual saves in the game? That's a huge relief, especially for modding, with all the user maps that may come out.
However they still should have had it from the start. The damage has already been done, with ROTT's reputation on launch taking a dive due to unfair deaths, not to mention all the places in levels where you can no longer backtrack.

[Striker]

I never give IGN nor GameSpot any credibility, they only give good reviews to those who bribe them / pay them massive sums of money to give said good reviews. They wouldn't know integrity of press if it slapped them in the face.

I'm not defending ROTT, and if such a review came from any other publisher, I'd give it some consideration, but this time, no... even if there is some degree of truth, there's always a little bit of "grrr... asshole game maker didn't give me money, I give bad review.... that'll teach those fuckers... grrr" mixed in with it.

These are the same people who gave the Splatterhouse reboot a bad review, and even outright and blatantly lied about and/or over-exaggerated certain issues simply because Namco didn't pay them for a high score.

[----]

 Commando Nukem, on 05 August 2013 - 03:20 PM, said:

Psst... Notice how the Interceptor guys are all gone now?


They got our money. Heeheeheehee...

Yeah? At least they step out and adress all issues.

Notice how Deke4.Net is not the prime forum for ROTT?

[Jeff]

 100199, on 05 August 2013 - 04:55 PM, said:

Not hating here, but it is just me that thinks professional developers that use the word 'haters' look like complete imature idiots? Reminds of that WARZ producer.

I was a little put off by that. I mean the guy is a CEO of the company too. He is the voice of the company and all his employees.

At any rate, glad they've got some fixing in the works.

[100199]

The way the enemies stand in the new ROTT is just ridiculous, feels like a shooting gallery.

I also want to re-replay classic ROTT again to see if the game's speed is indeed fast the same or the new rott its just too fast even for old Rott standards.

[Micky C]

I think it's more that the rooms and corridors are generally smaller than those in the original ROTT. The original had huge open spaces compared to the new one.

[100199]

indeed.
I wouldn't have problem with the speed if the AI could be smarter. If the devs improved the AI this game would vastly improves for me. At least would make the gunplay better.

[Micky C]

If their goal was to replicate the original game's AI, then it's not too far off. There is a bit of smarts in there somewhere, it's not just "stand still and shoot". Some of them steal your weapon, some of them roll sideways to avoid your attacks, although sometimes they roll into a wall, ending up doing a stationary roll which looks stupid; they ought to add a check that there's room in the direction they're about to roll in.

Otherwise I think it's decent. Note I've only half finished the game on easy so far.

[OpenMaw]

 fuegerstef, on 05 August 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

Yeah? At least they step out and adress all issues.

Notice how Deke4.Net is not the prime forum for ROTT?

What the Hell does that even mean? They're not alone on a hill in that regard. Many game developers "adress (sic) all the issues." The ego of some of the key players here, if turned down oh, I don't know, five or six notches? Might help them to not look like hacks who are crashing the quality train into a brick wall.


Bottom line, I wasn't even addressing where their main interest lie, and for the record that's a bullshit response since nothing stopped them from coming here when they were apparently working their butts off to get the game out. I'm addressing all the self serving jerking off that went on here for the last bunch of months. Good or bad, it was pretty effin' shameless.


For anyone who is interested, Totalbiscuit did do a fairly even handed first impressions of the game. I have to say I agree with him on most of his points, and if Interceptor truly does fix those key points, then the game can and will go on to be a moderate-to-cult hit, just as it was before with the original.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

 fuegerstef, on 05 August 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

Yeah? At least they step out and adress all issues.

By putting together a patch for critical "game-breaking" issues that should have been fixed in beta, and calling their detractors "haters".

Fucking classy.

[----]

I think they call the haters haters. Otherwise they wouldn't have adressed all the issues openly in that post.

[Ronin]

 fuegerstef, on 06 August 2013 - 05:11 AM, said:

I think they call the haters haters. Otherwise they wouldn't have adressed all the issues openly in that post.

I think you would like to say what you really think about this game but there is a conflict of interests.